Who owns your experience?
Genesis
A question central to this project is how to face contemporary challenges in the design of the built environment to improve the quality of urban life.
While studies published in top-tier journals investigate the significant relationships between exposure to nature and its effects on human health, including affective symptoms and cognitive abilities, still little of those findings are incorporated into the design of the urban spaces. Contemporary cityscape is to large extent industrialized and dominated by the design emphasizing function over aesthetics. Cities are optimized only for factors that can be quantitatively measured.
Even with increasing emphasis on the use of digital tools in the simulation and urban design process, aspects of beauty are still often marginalized as there is no body of scientific evidence available to support the arguments of value of architectural design beyond functionality.
With the “Image of The Forest” we invite the public to explore the visual qualities of the cityscape. Using transdisciplinary research we attempt to create scientific evidence and raise awareness of the value of the aesthetics of the built environment and their consequences for physiological, psychological, and mental well-being.
Significance
EU Context
“The New European Bauhaus initiative calls on all of us to imagine and build together a sustainable and inclusive future that is beautiful for our eyes, minds, and souls.”
Our ambition is to develop a method of universally and objectively describing the spatial qualities of urban environments - to create a feedback loop between the architectural space and its inhabitants.
This understanding would allow us to analyze the performance of places, both existing and proposed and show how aesthetic design decisions fundamentally impact the way that people move, interact and transact in streets and buildings.
At the same time working with a very intimate layer of thoughts expressed through EEG data “Image of the Forest” cannot escape the questions of privacy and control in the public space.
“The New European Bauhaus initiative calls on all of us to imagine and build together a sustainable and inclusive future that is beautiful for our eyes, minds, and souls.”
Our ambition is to develop a method of universally and objectively describing the spatial qualities of urban environments - to create a feedback loop between the architectural space and its inhabitants.
This understanding would allow us to analyze the performance of places, both existing and proposed and show how aesthetic design decisions fundamentally impact the way that people move, interact and transact in streets and buildings.
At the same time working with a very intimate layer of thoughts expressed through EEG data “Image of the Forest” cannot escape the questions of privacy and control in the public space.
Keywords
aesthetics, neuroscience, BCI, photography, power spectrum, perception, attention, affect, architecture, urban design, environment, well-being, cognition, forest, psychology, computation, bio-inspired, biophilia, nature, AI, artificial intelligence, machine learning, new media, data sculpture, interaction, HCI